


Go Home, Girl

by Draco_sollicitus



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mostly hurt, Post Season 8 Episode 5, Rated M for pervasive death and violence, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 12:14:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18810709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draco_sollicitus/pseuds/Draco_sollicitus
Summary: Sandor Clegane tells Arya Stark to live, and oddly enough, she listens to him.If only she could get out of the city to do just that. It's not the best timing to decide to live, right as she's most likely to die.(Post 08x05 where Arya figures out how to be a human again in the face of shocking destruction -- mild fix-it)





	Go Home, Girl

**Author's Note:**

> _Notes_
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> This is spoiler-full for Season 8 episode 5!!! 
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> Also: I know Arya shows up in the trailer for next week's episode, suggesting she doesn't leave King's Landing, and we all know what she's probably going to be involved in, but, whatever, we don't like that storyline anyway, do we?
> 
>  **Warnings**  
>  Rated M for pervasive violence/death, as the notes indicate (this could be rated T, but honestly I don't think the awfulness that Arya went through in this episode would belong in a PG-13 movie, so, that's why it's M)
> 
> Off-screen character death (we all know about it by now if we've seen the episode)
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> Thoughts of death/self-destruction/self-hatred
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> Messy mental state
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> Brief blood mentions

Arya walks through King’s Landing, ignoring the screams of panicked children and women, the garbled shouts of falling soldiers, the screech of a vengeful dragon, its rider invisible from the ground, but their presence known all the same.

Let the Dragon Queen burn them all: she has business to attend to.

Briefly, in the corner of her eye, she sees something.

A someone.

A little girl, running alongside her mother. The mother’s hair is shorn short, maybe from a lice infestation, maybe from choice. It doesn’t matter. The open fear on the little girl’s face doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that Arya was once a little girl running scared through King’s Landing while her father’s body cooled.

All that matters is the weight of her sword at her side, her dagger at her hip, and the man who walks beside her, his scarred face determined and set. Sandor Clegane doesn’t spare a glance to the little girl who might soon be as dead as Arya Stark.

They both came to finish something, and neither of them are leaving.

It changes when they hit the map room, the entirety of Westeros sprawling out underneath them. Arya looks down briefly, but fixes her eyes on what remains of the Keep. Cersei is ahead. Arya Stark will kill Cersei, and then her list will end.

The Hound steps out in front of her, and her brow furrows in confusion.

“Go home, girl.”

_What?_

He had every chance to send her back or dissuade her or mock her on the long road to King’s Landing, and he chooses this second to try it?

Arya steels herself for one of his scornful speeches. What she gets is much more dangerous.

With eyes sadder than a kicked pup’s, he frowns at her and begins to speak in a voice so soft, she’d think it her father’s, in a different time.

“The fire will get her, or one of the Dothraki. Or maybe that dragon will eat her. It doesn’t matter. She’s dead. And you’ll be dead too if you don’t get out of here.”

Arya grits her teeth and storms forward, but he catches her easily enough. Bloody giant bastard.

“I’m going to kill her,” she snarls, reminding him of her purpose. She won’t waver in it. She can’t

“You think you wanted revenge a long time? I’ve been after it all my life. It’s all I care about.” Arya tries to wrench her arm free, but it’s futile, as Clegane drags her back in with a snarl of his own. She turns to study the rise of the Keep behind them, a dragon screaming viciously in the backdrop of an otherwise beautiful sky, but the Hound forces her to turn and face him. “And look at me. Look at me!”

She does. It isn’t pretty. His face, scarred as ever, twisted in pain and imploring her to listen. For the first time since the long night, Arya feels fear. It creeps in. Reaches fingers of frost into her heart. Fills her chest and gut. Awakens whispers in her mind of _You have a name. You are Arya Stark. You love --_

“You want to be like me?” He wraps a massive hand around her neck, and for a brief moment, she wonders if he’ll snap her neck or slam his head into hers, incapacitating her because she’s too much of a nuisance here before he kills his brother once and for all. He doesn’t move to hurt her.

Instead, his eyes, wounded and broken and _begging,_ stare into hers, and the whispers in her heart become screams.

No one has looked at her like that since Ned Stark.

Ned Stark died here.

“You come with me. You die here.” Everything in his face suggests that this could be a terrible outcome. Now that they’re here, ready to confront their destinies side by side, he’s changed his mind; he doesn’t want to die next to her. He wants her to live. He sees her for what she is, and what she’s capable of, and he still wants her to live.

He rests his giant paw on her shoulder and gives her one, last, searching look before walking away. As he nears the exit, Arya calls out, a word she’s never said with anything less than rancor.

“Sandor.” Their eyes meet again.

A moment of understanding stretches between them. Infinite. Too short. In another life, she would have cried and told him she loved him. It isn’t that life.

“Thank you.”

Sandor Clegane takes a deep breath and nods. Not another word is said.

She knows it’s the last time she’ll ever see him.

Arya turns and runs through the city. She chooses life and not death for the first time in nearly five years.

She will live, and the Hound was the one to save her. If she had breath to spare, she’d laugh at the irony.

***

Arya can’t breathe.

The girl and her mother run at her side, but they can’t run fast enough, and the dragon screams behind them. She’s going to pay for that sudden clarity, that desire to save as many as she can, to die protecting the innocent.

She’s going to die a Stark.

Arya Stark will die in King’s Landing, like she should have done all those years ago when Syrio Forel paid the price for her. She’ll die with honor, right when she discovered how very badly she wanted to live.

Poetic, really.

The woman trips as the Dothraki surge towards them, and Arya loses her grip on the woman for the second time that day; she doesn’t know the woman’s name, but the idea of her or her child dying will break her. It will break her again, when she’d sworn to never break again.

The dragon grows nearer, and Arya wheels around when the horses are gone to pick the woman up. She’s groaning and near death, and the little girl is screaming for her mama. The dragon flies nearer. Arya screams and begs and for once sounds and feels every inch her eighteen years. She gets her on her feet, but she collapses.

“Take her,” the woman begs, pushing the little girl towards Arya. Arya hasn’t picked a child up in all the years she’s been alive, and for a wild moment, she thinks that, for once, Sansa might be of more use on a battlefield than herself.

The moment’s gone as she drags the child to safety, but the girl breaks her grip and runs back to her mother.

Arya throws herself around the corner as the dragon dives towards them, and she protects her face as much as she can as heat and rubble and death surround her.

As she fades away under the pressure and pain and shock, she thinks, strangely, of waters, still and deep, waters, soothing and healing, waters that reach up to protect her, waters that whisper, “ _You’re beautiful and I love you._ ”

Waters, the last thing Arya thinks of before she dies.

***

Arya Stark lives. She opens her eyes to a broken, ash-filled world.

The ash settles everywhere: her skin, her clothes, her hair, her lungs. Her chest heaves with every breath, but she finds a horse, somehow, a horse surviving all of this, and she shushes it gently before climbing on and heading for the gates, the wreckage burning around her.

***

She rides for as long as she can, her lungs still weak. She maybe gets twenty miles outside the city gates before the horse collapses, exhausted, near a stream and starts to drink.

Arya rolls off and towards the stream, ducking her head under, staying under the water for a long time before emerging, coughing still and spitting up grey water that comes out thick as clay.

The sky is still a mocking blue above her, and her ears are ringing. It convinces her that every time she blinks, she might open her eyes to the dragon screaming overhead. She might never sleep again.

To the south, she can see the smoke still rising.

The Hound is probably dead. Jon is probably dead. Sansa is to the north, not knowing that they’re all dead, that their men were used for cruelty. She can’t imagine her sister’s face when she finds out. She can’t imagine the world ever healing from this.

Arya Stark cries.

Gulping, horrible cries with no tears to spare, her chest spasming, her stomach aching. She cries until there is absolutely nothing left, just this aching, throbbing, sore of a soul she’s decided to reclaim, and she hates it. Hates the Hound for making her take it back. Hates the Many-Faced God for taking it from her in the first place. Hates herself for giving it up, for taking it back, for everything she’s done and said and left behind in the process.

Arya Stark lies there under the slight shade of a twisted tree, a broken horse lying next to her, and she fades in and out of consciousness, the pain in her lungs too much, the pain in her head stultifying her in her brief moments of consciousness, her exhaustion winning out over every fighting instinct she’s ever had. She’s going to die here in the wild, like she left Clegane to die all those years ago; he gave her the gift of life, and she’s just going to die the way he should have, and the world spins in and out, out and in.

When she’s lucid, she adds Daenerys Targaryen’s name to the list.

Takes it off.

Puts it back on.

Revenge won’t bring that woman and her child back; killing the Dragon Queen will stop more women and children from dying. Women and children always die, though. The first to die, the first to be mourned.

Arya Stark glares at the sky and fights to remain herself.

_I am more than steel and snow. I am more than death. I am more than revenge, I am more than forgiveness._

_I am a person. I have a name._

It hurts, in every possible way, and Arya closes her eyes again, praying they won’t open this time.

***

“Arya?”

_A girl knows that voice._

“Arya? Oh, gods, Arya, please--”

_A girl has a name. A girl is Arya --_

“--Stark, come on, please, come back to me, don’t you die on me--”

_I know that voice._

“You’re alive, I know you’re alive, but I’m not a bloody doctor, please, open your eyes!”

Something wet touches her palm. It grounds her more than the voice does, strangely.

“--we found you, please, please, Arya, c’mon, Arry, open your eyes--”

_Only one person left would call her by that name._

“Who’s going to kick my ass if you’re gone?”

“I’m sure you’ll find someone,” she wheezes, coughing roughly, and the person holding her, cradling her in their lap, curses and props her upright, rubbing soft circles into her back. “Stop it-- s-stop it, I’m fine--”

“Oh, gods.”

Arya forces herself to open her eyes. It’s darker now, the sun setting. Smoke still rises from King’s Landing, dark shadows in a clear sky. Something wet touches her palm again, and she looks down to see what it is.

She gasps, a brittle noise that escapes through her teeth as she inhales sharply.

Nymeria blinks up at her, the direwolf’s massive form leaning up against her, keeping her warm.

The horse that saved her stands some distance away, eating and keeping a wary eye on the wolf that protects its pack. Another horse stands next to it, a handsome one bearing the Stark crest on its bridle.

“How did you find me?” Arya whispers, staring down at her direwolf in wonder.

“She found you, really.”

Arya looks to him at last, and while she suspects looking at her causes him some amount of pain, he doesn’t show it, just looks at her as steady and honest and kind as always.

“I was riding down the King’s Landing to join the fight when she passed by me, howling and snapping at the horse until we followed her. I had to abandon the path.”

“I’m glad you did.” Arya’s lip trembles, and she closes her eyes, ashamed to have discovered her softness so suddenly.

“Arya, what happened?” She shakes her head, and Gendry strokes her hair gently, hissing when he discovers the numerous cuts that litter her scalp. “Arry?”

“It’s like you said before,” Arya whispers. “About the White Walkers. Only this time, it was the dragon.” She makes herself look at him, and he hasn’t moved, his expression hasn’t shifted. Waters, still and deep and true. “It was like death.”

He studies her face for a long moment, something in his eyes breaking at whatever he finds, but he rests his forehead against hers and holds her tighter. Arya lets him. For the first time she can remember, she lets herself sag against someone else, lets them hold her and wrap their arms around her, lets them take her in and promise to protect her.

Nymeria is at her back, and Gendry holds her so carefully, and this, this can be her pack.

“But, you’re alive,” Gendry murmurs softly into her hair, one hand sliding up her back to cradle her closer. “You’re alive, Arya Stark.”

“And so are you, Gendry Baratheon.” She laughs wetly and thinks to when she rejected him, shaking her head at the memory. “I was so afraid that one of us wouldn’t be at the end of this, that’s why--”

“It’s Waters,” he corrects her softly, and they pull apart to look at each other.

“What?”

“It’s Gendry Waters. The way I see it, no Baratheon wanted me as their own. The only person who’s ever wanted me as family was you, and you wanted me when I was Waters. I don’t want to be a lord. I don’t want Storm’s End, and I don’t want a castle. I went looking for you to tell you, but you’d--”

“I’d already left,” Arya nods, tired, her eyes drooping, and she rests her cheek against Gendry’s shoulder. “...I’m not going to say sorry.”

“Of course you aren’t,” Gendry strokes her back as she starts to drift away again.

The city burns behind them, but her wolf is here, her pack is here, and she can rest a little while.

“I wouldn’t love you if you were the person who’d say sorry,” he continues, and Arya smiles drowsily.

“I thought of you,” she whispers. “When I died.”

His intake of breath sounds pained, and she can feel his heart stall and speed up under her ear. Charming, really. “ _What_?”

“The dragonfire,” she murmurs, burrowing her face into his solid, warm chest. Nymeria’s fur is soft below her sore feet, and she wonders when she lost her boots. “It got me. And I thought about you.”

“Arry--”

“Thought I’d like to live. To tell you I loved you.” She can’t fight the darkness from pulling her under.

“Is that so?”

“Mhm.” She nods and lets go, lets him hold her for the next little while. “It was at the top of my list.”

Arya doesn’t need her eyes to be open to know that Gendry Waters is smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> What's that, D & D? I can't...hear your ridiculous canon...over my homegrown fix-it fics. 
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> (Does this need a second, soft, mildly smutty hurt/comfort chapter? Who knows! Maybe I'll just continue to write tragic/flangsty Gendrya one shots!)


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